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The Azure Percept is a Microsoft Developer Kit designed to fast track development of AI (Artificial Intelligence) applications at the Edge.


 


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Percept Specifications


 


At a high level, the Percept Developer kit has the following specifications;


 


Carrier (Processor) Board:


 


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  • NXP iMX8m processor

  • Trusted Platform Module (TPM) version 2.0

  • Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity


 


Vision SoM:


 


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  • Intel Movidius Myriad X (MA2085) vision processing unit (VPU)

  • RGB camera sensor


 


Audio SoM:


 


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  • Four-microphone linear array and audio processing via XMOS Codec

  • 2x buttons, 3x LEDs, Micro USB, and 3.5 mm audio jack


 


Percept Target Verticals


 


The Percept is a Developer Kit with a variety of target industries in mind. As such, Microsoft have created some pre-trained AI models aimed at those markets.


 


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These models can be deployed to the percept to quickly configure the Percept to recognise objects in a set of environments, such as;


 



  • General Object Detection

  • Items on a Shelf

  • Vehicle Analytics

  • Keyword and Command recognition

  • Anomaly Detection etc


 


Azure Percept Studio


 


Microsoft provide a suite of software to interact with the Percept, centred around Azure Percept Studio, an Azure based dashboard for the Percept.


 


Azure Percept Studio is broken down into several main sections;


 


Overview:


 


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This section gives us an overview of Percept Studio, including;


 



  • A Getting Started Guide

  • Demos & Tutorials,

  • Sample Applications

  • Access to some Advanced Tools including Cloud and Local Development Environments as well as setup and samples for AI Security.


 


Devices:


 


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The Devices Page gives us access to the Percept Devices we’ve registered to the solution’s IoT Hub.


 


We’re able to click into each registered device for information around it’s operations;


 


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This area is broken down into;


 



  • A General page with information about the Device Specs and Software Version

  • Pages with Software Information for the Vision and Speech Modules deployed to the device as well as links to Capture images, View the Vision Video Stream, Deploy Models and so on

  • We’re able to open the Device in the Azure IoT Hub Directly

  • View the Live Telemetry from the Percept

  • Links with help if we need to Troubleshoot the Percept


 


Vision:


 


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The Vision Page allows us to create new Azure Custom Vision Projects as well as access any existing projects we’ve already created.


 


Speech:


 


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 The Speech page gives us the facility to train Custom Keywords which allow the device to be voice activated;


 


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We can also create Custom Commands which will initiate an action we configure;


 


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Percept Speech relies on various Azure Services including LUIS (Language Understanding Intelligent Service) and Azure Speech.


 


Other Resources


 


 



 


 


 



 

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